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Preface

This book describes ways to help students build the language that they need to succeed in school. As students leave the primary grades, their academic success depends more and more on their abilities to use academic language. A common misconception of academic language is that it is just a long list of key content words such as covalent, meritocracy, reciprocal, hyperbole, and onomatopoeia. Yet content vocabulary—knowing the big words—is just one dimension of academic language. Students must also develop skills with the many "smaller words" and grammatical conventions that make the big words stick together to make meaning. This book, therefore, emphasizes the terms and tactics that tend to slip under our content vocabulary radar, but are vital for describing the abstract concepts, higher-order thinking processes, and complex relationships in each discipline.

Academic language is often cited as one of the key factors affecting the achievement gap that exists between high and low-performing groups of students in our schools (Wong Fillmore, 2004). And whether performance is measured by large tests or informal observations, many students perform poorly because they cannot handle the linguistic demands of different disciplines. This is especially visible in our upper elementary and secondary classes. As students move out of primary grades, they not only enter new classrooms, but they also enter into new ways of knowing, thinking, and communicating.

Students who under-perform often have backgrounds that have not primed them for mainstream schooling's ways of learning, speaking, reading, thinking, and learning. You can probably picture several (perhaps several dozen) of these students right now. They are immigrants, great grandchildren of immigrants, speakers of non-mainstream dialects, special education students, and others who have not been immersed in the academic thought and talk that is valued in school. As a result, their performances are not valued when they take tests, as they read and write, or during class discussions. These students need more than tutoring sessions, new software programs, special classes, extra visuals and gestures, and test prep programs—they need rich classroom experiences that accelerate their content knowledge, thinking skills, literacy skills, and the language that supports them. They need acceleration because their high-performing peers do not just linger around, waiting for them to catch up.

Chapter 1 - Understanding How Students Use Language

The Role of Home and Community

Students bring with them to school a wide range of social experiences, cultural practices, ways of thinking, and communication styles. These form powerful yet hard-to-see foundations for learning. Diverse students are often raised learning and thinking in ways that tend to differ from the ways valued by mainstream teachers, school culture, and test-makers. Most of us teachers learn about these differences in pre-service teacher training—but we often fail to consistently apply this knowledge when we teach and assess. For this reason, this chapter briefly addresses some of the significant mismatches between home and classroom, along with how to help diverse students add on additional ways of thinking and communicating that help them to succeed academically.

For many non-mainstream students, school is a large set of very new situations, with new things to learn and new ways to talk and think. This can be overwhelming for them. As James Gee (1996) states,"It is just that only a narrow range of these culturally specific home-based skills are rewarded in school, namely those most often found in mainstream homes" (p. 24). For example, certain home-based language practices such as story book reading and parental questioning at the dinner table correlate strongly with academic success (Cook-Gumperz, 1986, Wells, 1986).

When a student enters school, "mismatches" can negatively affect learning. When a mismatch occurs, the student struggles to learn new "rules" of talk and literacy because these rules are implied and even invisible. That is, we teachers often take them for granted because we assume common knowledge and procedures among learners (Edwards & Mercer, 1993). It makes sense that the more "school-like" the tasks and communication are at home, the better students are likely to perform at school. Likewise, the more"teacher-like" the language of a student is, the more the students will meet our expectations and be considered successful.

Table of Contents